Hello! Hope you are doing fine. Thanks for dropping by to catch up with Part 4 of Scrapefoot. I thought it would only be four parts, but this story has other ideas! Thanks so much for reading.

This week, who exactly has broken in to Rebecca’s mum’s house?

SCRAPEFOOT #4

 For the first time in my adult life, I felt a bit blindsided. How on earth was I going to get him out?

    “If you don’t leave immediately, I’m definitely going to call the police and have you done for breaking and entering.”

    “I didn’t break anything,” he said. “I fix things.”

He nodded towards the table leg. He was crafty.

     “How exactly did you get in?”

He laid a finger aside his long, elegant nose and tapped it. “Ways and means, ways and means.”

    “What? Look, this is my mother’s home and-”

     “But she isn’t, is she?”

    “Isn’t what?”

    “At home.”

     “She’s in a home. Look, this is really none of your business.”

He put another log on the fire as if the words coming out of my mouth meant nothing to him.

      “I’ve cut some logs for her, out the back.” He dusted his hands together.

      “But-but she doesn’t need logs. She’s in a home, where she is being looked after.”

        “Looked after.” He repeated. “After. Doesn’t that word mean behind? Like something left behind, or a second thought?”

I was so angry I couldn’t reply. I glanced at my phone screen. Was calling 999 an overreaction? He didn’t seem dangerous, just…odd. I was just trying to remember the non-emergency police number when he stalked past me. I caught that sharp whiff again, the foxy, musky smell. I’d forgotten about the fox. Had it gone into the other room? That’s where he seemed to be going, the strange man, crossing the floor with long loping strides. Into the sitting room he went, and I followed him. He sat down in the big easy chair where Mum used to relax to watch Coronation Street and do her crossword. The memory made something go chink inside me, like a bit of ice breaking off. The man gave a couple of experimental bounces.

    “This is better, isn’t it?” He jumped up so quickly I backed away, but he came after me, took my arm gently, the way a spaniel picks up a feathery game bird. “Come on- you try it. Remember how this chair was really lumpy?”

    “No I don’t. This was my mother’s chair. I’m not in the habit of sitting in it and she never complained”

Reluctantly, I let him guide me to the chair and I sat down. The cushion moulded to my shape. Even though every sinew in my body was knotted with tension, I let myself imagine how wonderful it would be to let the softness of the cushion lure me into complete relaxation. Horrified, I sat bolt upright.

    “Is this a new cushion? What the hell are you playing at?”

The pale stranger plonked himself down on the sofa, did another couple of experimental bounces, and then moved to the wing chair by the window, the one that had been my grandmother’s. That chair, I recalled, was evil. It seemed to have springs pinging from its soul.

    “This chair is dreadful,” he said. “So hard and uncomfortable.”

     “Yes, you’re right. I’ve never liked that chair.”

      “And the couch- well, that is too soft.”

  I tipped my head in consideration. “I always quite liked the couch. I used to curl up there to do my homework.”

   “ Bad for your back. I bet you have a bad back.”

  “ I have sciatica, but that’s neither here nor-”

   “ So I found that cushion in the skip and now your mother’s chair is just right. She’ll be so happy when she comes home.”

He looks so pleased with himself, like a smiley collie dog, that I don’t have the heart to tell him she will never be coming home.

Thank you for reading!

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Sandra x